Operation Christmas Child

Christmas comes a little late in Cambodia – loading up several million Christmas shoe boxes for the famous Samaritan’s Purse “Operation Christmas Child” and shipping them out for eager children world wide is no easy undertaking. So Tara and I were very happy to make it back to Cambodia in time to get in on the last of the shoebox distributions going on in our various communities.

For those of you not familiar with “OCC”, families around North America, Europe, and Australia pack up shoe boxes full of clothes, toys, and other useful/fun items for children and send them to the SP main offices where they are checked, sealed, and sent off to communities around the world. The boxes are then distributed by staff and volunteers to excited children in impoverished communities.

As you can imagine there are some amazing stories and some very warm hearts at the end of each year’s distributions. Although Tara and I only went to a couple communities, it was a blast handing out 2 to 3 hundred boxes to kids who were bursting at the seams. Ordering kids into lines according to age and gender, stacking all the shoeboxes front and center, and then giving a little speech and sometimes Sunday School lesson can build anticipation to nearly toxic levels. Sometimes you wonder that the kids just don’t faint dead away.

But in the end you have a couple hundred smiling faces, and the hour it took to assemble everyone, only one minute is need to empty out the meeting area as kids leave with evacuation-like-speed back to their homes to try out their new found gifts. You can check out a few of the photo’s we took by clicking on this link or going to the photovault and clicking on “tags” at the top of the page.